The Boom Bomb

This is a matter for serious consideration at some point but there's no hurry.

Apparently my "ho hum" of yesterday may not have been entirely ignorant; it still hasn't been determined if it indeed was a successful nuclear explosion. Three possibilities:
--Low yield "concept test". Totally successful.
--Intended high yield test, but with much of the materiel not entering chain reaction, a fission fizzle.
--Or fraud. Just a bunch of conventional explosives going off to fool the world.

I pretty much dismiss this last. The only real benefit to them of this test is that it would allow them to feel good about themselves. --Or they could be trying to extort carrots, but that seems too sophisticated for me.

That it was intended as a low yield concept test I dismiss because I can't believe they're capable of subtlety.

So fizzle as fact fits. I presume physicists under ill Kim are flustered and frightened and so do bad work. --And I note the Russians have said the yield was 10 to 20 times greater than anybody else has been able to measure. Sounds to me like a cover for Kim; Kim kin cover.

.........Ha! A consideration that this might have been a sophisticated "lost" Russian suitcase bomb!? Exactly the right yeid! That would be scary. An advertisement to the purchaser that they've got them and they work. About a 100 of them out there and missing. --Think Wretchcard came up with this idea.

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Man, that Drudge guy! He posts stuff before anybody else.

U.S. intelligence agencies say, based on preliminary indications, that North Korea did not produce its first nuclear blast yesterday, WASHINGTON TIMES star reporter Bill Gertz is set to report in Tuesday editions.
"There was a seismic event that registered about 4 on the Richter scale, but it still isn't clear if it was a nuclear test. You can get that kind of seismic reading from high explosives.'
U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that seismic readings show that the conventional high explosives used to create a chain reaction in a plutonium-based device went off, but that the blast's readings were shy of a typical nuclear detonation.

I must say this uncertainty is kind of fun And it could be useful. Status is probably what's most important to ill Kim, and if he's embarrassed that's a handle that might be tweaked. I'm uncertain just how but it is a handle.

This is the link to Wretchcard's speculation regarding the suitcase nuke possibility.
(10:35 PM)

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Thoreau

And in the interest simply of something different I'm now going to include two emails I just wrote to a friend in answer to a question:

"I guess Thoreau was very upset with the human destruction of nature even a hundred years ago. Is that true?"

The short answer is no, though any academic will say yes.

Thoreau had a great love of nature, the proof being the immense number of hours he spent out in the woods; and he was immensely criticalof "modern" society because it was so concerned with getting and acquiring; it was too busy, it was constantly concerned with work. To him the ideal life was wandering around in the woods during the day, and reading books at night. He was a great example for an individual, a terrible example for a society. And he never was specifically concerned about the destruction of nature.

However, he was a part of the Transcendentalist Movement. These were people who went out and appreciated nature for two hours on weekends and then came back to live lives just like everybody else around them but feeling very morally superior because those others were unenlightened and did not worship nature. And that's the exactly correct word. To Transcendentalists God was pantheistic, he existed in nature, and nowhere else. So they worshiped nature, but didn't much like it.

The ecco-enviornmentalists of today are the Transcendentalists of 150 years ago, merely more extreme. Unfortunately for Thoreau, nominally a part of that movement, he was the only great writer they produced, and so he's been taken up by the present day environmentalists and forced into their world view. He would have considered them of a very inferior moral order. --It is true though, that Thoreau was not theologically gifted. He could not well have explained why their ideas were wrong, he would have just recognized they were fakes.

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A bit more on Thoreau.

He was my hero in highschool. I first read him in the summer of my 9th grade year and he certainly influenced the manner of life I chose more than any other writer. But he was primarily a philosopher as to the best kind of life for an individual. He felt utterly no impulse to transform society, and that's an additional reason why I find it offensive that ecco-environmentalist types try to make him one of them.

John Muir, on the other hand, does fit their mold, he was an activist. He founded the Sierra Club and was instrumental in establishing Yosemite as a national park. Both would have at times made similar sounding statements about "the great cathedral of nature", but their personalities were vastly different. John Muir did want to preserve primitive wilderness against the depredations of man. Thoreau, on the other hand, would have been quite comfortable with "dual use" (though the term didn't exist in those days). He probably would have been pleased that the spectacular expressions of forrest were preserved but to him nature was where you found it. He preferred woods to parks, but anything next to a farm was just fine.

Izaac Walton was another apostle of the joys of nature, and a sort of "dual-use" guy. The Izaac Walton leagues have historically been conservationists, but not environmentalists. That's perhaps because they yet follow Walton's philosophy. He was a conscious Christian and believed man, as a part of nature, yet had dominion over all things. Environmentalists don't like that because they consider man the scum of the earth, the one flaw in the design of nature.

And this is why poor Thoreau can be used. He was a Transcendentalist. God existed in nature but in nature only. It's not far to go from there to say man doesn't belong. But Thoreau never concerned himself with such thoughts. He was a philosopher preaching simplicity and self-reliance who just happened to have a very great love for the woods. I think he was born with that love. It didn't arise from philosophy, in fact never became philosophy. That love was just personality.
(12:29 AM)

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Developing Story?

I sent this as a part of the continuing flow of emails, and I am very curious as to whether or not it will bring the hoped for result.
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It's been going through my mind for hours now that maybe you ought to try reading Walden Pond. You speak of "Something calming and delightful in natural things even quite apart from any ventures to preserve them." In Thoreau you're under no pressures to take nature seriously. You're under no pressure of any sort. He sets himself the task of trying to lead a personally meaningful life and it just happens that as he does that he's involved in nature because that's just the way he is. If you read John Muir you either agree with him or don't but you get passionate. With Thoreau you don't even notice. Nature is just there, and if you respond to nature you'll probably respond to him.

As I've said, I discovered him when I was 14 and was immediately enthralled and he did shape my life more than any other man.

At any rate, one chapter is all you need to read. You'll either respond to the personality, or you won't. If you like him that's great, if you don't that's no criticism. Some do, some don't. He can be read in tiny bits over the course of months, or all at once, or be abandoned. But there's utterly nothing complex in him. He's straight forward. His power is that he precisely sees simple things that are important to some people.

By the way, he has written some famous essays. DO NOT READ THEM! They're significant, but from them you'll only understand an argument, you won't know the personality.

If you happen to like Thoreau it's like having a friend inside your head who sees the same things you do
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I'll keep this space open in case there's anything to follow. developing...
Oct 12, 2:47 AM)
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